he straying horse over his arm, and
the animal trotted obediently by the side of the fidgety little
Cossacks.

"That was bad luck," exclaimed the elder man at length, "d--d bad luck!
In this country the less you find, the less you see, the less you
understand, the simpler is your existence. Those Nihilists, with their
mysterious ways and their reprehensible love of explosives, have made
honest men's lives a burden to them."

"Their motives were originally good," put in Paul.

"That is possible; but a good motive is no excuse for a bad means. They
wanted to get along too quickly. They are pig-headed, exalted,
unpractical to a man. I do not mention the women, because when women
meddle in politics they make fools of themselves, even in England. These
Nihilists would have been all very well if they had been content to sow
for posterity. But they wanted to see the fruits of their labors in one
generation. Education does not grow like that. It requires a couple of
generations to germinate. It has to be manured by the brains of fools
before it is of any use. In England it has reached this stage; here in
Russia the sowing has only begun. Now, we were doing some good. The
Charity League was the thing. It began by training their starved bodies
to be ready for the education when it came. And very little of it would
have come in our time. If you educate a hungry man, you set a devil
loose upon the world. Fill their stomachs before you feed their brains,
or you will give them mental indigestion; and a man with mental
indigestion raises hell or cuts his own throat."

"That is just what I want to do--fill their stomachs. I don't care about
the rest. I'm not responsible for the progress of the world or the good
of humanity," said Paul.

He rode on in silence; then he burst out again in the curt phraseology
of a man whose feeling is stronger than he cares to admit.

"I've got no grand ideas about the human race," he said. "A very little
contents me. A little piece of Tver, a few thousand peasants, are good
enough for me. It seems rather hard that a fellow can't give away of his
surplus money in charity if he is such a fool as to want to."

Steinmetz was riding stubbornly along. Suddenly he gave a little
chuckle--a guttural sound expressive of a somewhat Germanic
satisfaction.

"I don't see how they can stop us," he said. "The League, of course, is
done; it will crumble away in sheer panic. But here, in Tver, they
cannot stop u